Wild Fire

by Nelson DeMille

  I replied, “That’s about it.”

  Schaeffer nodded and said, “Could’ve happened that way.” He asked me, or himself, “But why in the name of God would they murder a Federal agent?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  Kate asked, “Has anyone else had a hunting accident on or around this trail, or near the Custer Hill property?”

  Schaeffer kept his eyes on the narrow trail and replied, “I’ve been thinking about that since Detective Corey brought it up yesterday, so I asked around and the answer is yes, about twenty years ago when the Custer Hill property was being developed.” He informed us, “It happened about five miles north of the property. One of my old-timers remembered it.”

  Kate asked, “What was the outcome?”

  “Hunting accident, shooter unknown.”

  “And the victim?”

  “Never identified.” He briefed us, “Male, about forty, clean shaven, well nourished, and so forth. Single shot to the head. It was summer, and the victim was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and hiking boots. No ID, the body was at least two weeks dead when discovered, and some animals had gotten to it. Facial photos were taken but not shown to the general public for obvious reasons. Fingerprints were recovered, but not good ones, and they were unmatchable to any data banks that existed at the time.”

  Kate pointed out, “Isn’t that a little suspicious? I mean, single shot to the head, no ID, no one reported missing, and I assume no vehicle turned up in the area.”

  “Well, yeah. It’s suspicious. But according to my guy who remembered it, there was not a single clue or evidence of foul play, so, to make things simple, the sheriff and the coroner ruled it an accident, awaiting any information to the contrary.” He added, “We’re still waiting.” He paused, then said, “Even now, with this apparent homicide, I wouldn’t try to connect that death to the Custer Hill Club, which wasn’t even occupied at the time.”

  I said to him, “Run the fingerprints again.”

  We drove on in silence. I thought, of course, there could very well be a connection. The victim, if he had been murdered, could be some hiker who saw something he wasn’t supposed to see at the Custer Hill construction site—or maybe it was some guy working on the Custer Hill project who saw or knew too much about something. Like ELF. Or something else.

  I didn’t want to start making Bain Madox into this evil genius who was responsible for everything that went wrong in the world for the last twenty years—floods, famine, war, plague, earthquakes, my extra ten pounds, and my divorce. But this guy certainly fit the part of some sort of global manipulator. I mean, the rule is, If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.

  Then, I kill the duck.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Major Schaeffer pulled off the trail onto a recently cleared patch of ground, explaining, “We needed to widen the trail here for a turnaround.”

  We got out and followed him another twenty yards to where an area was staked out with yellow tape. On the trail itself, they’d used Day-Glo orange to spray paint an outline of Harry’s body. In the center of the outline was a blue jay, pecking the ground.

  The sun was higher now, and light penetrated the trees and lit up the pleasant woodland trail. Birds were chirping, and squirrels scampered through the trees, dropping acorn husks. A soft breeze rustled the fall leaves, which floated down in a constant flurry. Now it is autumn and the falling fruit . . .

  There’s no good place to die, but I suppose if you didn’t die in your own bed, this was as good a place as any.

  On the other side of the taped-off area, I saw a state police SUV on the trail.

  Schaeffer said, “Those guys came in from the other direction. They’re still looking for a shell casing, but whoever did this did not leave a casing or anything else behind. And we still haven’t found the bullet that passed through the victim’s body.”

  I nodded. Assuming the murder weapon was a high-velocity rifle, the chances of finding the bullet in the woods were not good. In fact, there were many spent bullets in the woods, and there was no way that any of them could be identified as the bullet that killed the victim. Even a ballistics match on one of Madox’s rifles wouldn’t prove anything except that Madox, or a guest, had once gone hunting in the woods. Bottom line—the woods were a good place to commit murder.

  Schaeffer continued, “We’re keeping the tape out at fifty feet for now, but I’m going to pull it tighter today, then by tomorrow, there’s no reason to keep this as a pristine crime scene.” He informed us, “Rain forecast for tomorrow.” He added, “I think we and the CSI team did all we could. There’s nothing here.”

  Again I nodded, as I kept staring at the Day-Glo orange outline. The blue jay had been joined by its mate.

  Schaeffer said, “If you look up the trail, you’ll see that it’s fairly straight, so it’s hard to imagine a hunter on this trail mistaking a man for a deer. And if the hunter was in the woods, it would take a miracle shot to pass through all these trees without hitting one of them.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “Looks like murder.”

  “Unfortunately, other than the near impossibility of this being an accident, we don’t have a shred of evidence that it was murder.” He reminded me, “There was no robbery, and the victim had no local ties that might lead to a grudge killing, which sometimes happens up here.”

  I didn’t reply. Major Schaeffer obviously suspected that Harry’s assignment was linked to his death, and that the murderer was Bain Madox, but he wasn’t going to take that step until he had a good piece of evidence.

  Schaeffer asked us, “Do you want to see the photos?”

  I didn’t, but I said, “Please.”

  He took a stack of color photos from his overcoat pocket and handed them to me. I flipped through them as Kate stood beside me.

  Harry had fallen face-first, as I already knew, and his arms were thrown out from his sides by the impact of the bullet, as shown in the spray-painted outline on the trail.

  I could barely see the entry wound in the center of his back, but close-ups revealed a bloodstain in the center of his camouflage jacket.

  I stared at a close-up that showed the left side of Harry’s face with his eyes open.

  I could see the leather strap around his neck that was connected to the binoculars, which had landed clear of his body and were lying close to his left shoulder, near his face.

  I asked Major Schaeffer, “Was that the position of the binoculars when you found the body?”

  “Yes. These are the photos that were taken before we touched or moved anything.” He added, “It may be that he was holding or looking through the binoculars when he was shot, which I think is why they’re clear of the body and not under his chest. Or, the impact of the round hitting the body just caused the binoculars to swing on their strap away from the body before it hit the ground.”

  Possible, but not probable. First, Harry was not looking through his binoculars before he’d been murdered by the people who brought him here. Second, the laws of physics would suggest that the binoculars would swing back to their original position, hanging on Harry’s chest, before his body hit the ground. But that was not a certainty.

  Major Schaeffer continued, “You saw his personal effects laid out in the morgue, and his video camera was found in the right pouch pocket of his jacket, the camera in his left. In the right cargo pocket of his pants was the bird guide and in the left was the pair of wire cutters.”

  Major Schaeffer, referring to his notebook, recited the inventory of what was found—key chain, wallet, Glock, credentials, and so forth, and where it was found on the body.

  As Schaeffer spoke, I tried to reconstruct how Madox had done this, and I concluded that he’d needed at least one accomplice—probably Carl and maybe someone else, though I doubted that Madox wanted two witnesses to this.

  Harry had been drugged, and his ankles had been shackled. They’d put him in the sleeping
compartment of the camper and driven him out here. There could have been a second vehicle for a getaway.

  Assuming, then, that Madox did not want more than one accomplice, and assuming that Harry was drugged and nearly comatose, Madox was then presented with the problem of how to stand Harry upright so he could be shot in the back as though he’d been walking.

  One man could not hold a drugged man upright while the other fired, so the solution was to put Harry on his knees, while Carl—or Madox—held the binoculars and strap tightly around Harry’s neck to keep him in the kneeling position. Then, the shooter knelt and put a bullet through Harry’s spine and heart.

  The accomplice let go of the binoculars as Harry was falling forward, and the binoculars ended up where I saw them in the photo. Then, one or both men unshackled Harry’s ankles and moved his arms and legs to simulate the position of a body being hit by a high-velocity bullet and falling forward from a standing position. Then, probably, they’d brushed the trail with pine boughs. The only thing they’d forgotten was that the binoculars would most probably have ended up under the body, and may also have been damaged by the round passing through the body and out the chest.

  Otherwise, they did a good job, if I could use that word for a cold-blooded murder.

  Schaeffer asked us, “Do you want to see the camper?”

  I nodded and handed the photos back to him.

  He led us around the yellow tape and through the woods.

  We came out on the trail again near the SUV, where the police had also widened the trail for a turnaround. Schaeffer got one of his troopers to drive us the three miles up the trail to where the camper sat parked in a small clearing.

  We got out, and I looked at Harry’s camper, which I’d never seen before. It was an old Chevy pickup, fitted with a sleeper on the truck bed. Old as it was, it seemed as if it had been kept meticulously clean and in good repair.

  Schaeffer said, “We dusted it for prints, did some vacuuming, and got some dirt samples out of the tire treads. This afternoon, we’ll tow it out of here to the highway, put it on a flatbed, and send it to the forensic garage in Albany for a thorough going-over. Obviously, we’re looking for evidence of other people being in the vehicle.”

  I said to him, “Sounds like you think it was premeditated murder.”

  “Let’s assume it was.”

  I pictured Harry drugged and bound in the rear sleeping compartment, and someone, maybe Carl, at the wheel. Driving in front of the camper was Madox in one of his vehicles: a Jeep, a van, or an all-terrain vehicle.

  I asked Schaeffer about tire marks on the trail, and he replied, “As you can see, this is hard-packed earth, plus it hasn’t rained in two weeks, and then you have all these leaves and pine boughs on the trail. So, no, we didn’t get any good tire marks.”

  Kate asked, “Did the dusting indicate that any surfaces had been wiped clean?”

  “No. When you have premeditation, you have gloves. We might get some interesting clothing fibers, but again, with premeditation and smarts, the perpetrators would burn whatever they wore.” He added, “There’s an open Coke can in the beverage holder, and we’ll do a DNA on that, but I don’t think our perps were drinking Coke. If we recover DNA, it will probably be Harry’s.”

  Schaeffer looked around at the clearing, then down the trail, and said, “Okay, so here’s the camper. What I’m thinking is that there were at least two perpetrators, and two vehicles—the camper and the getaway vehicle—though, as I said, there were no distinct tire marks. They stopped back there, shot the victim, then got back in the vehicles and continued on, putting some distance between themselves and the scene of the crime.”

  Kate and I nodded, and Schaeffer continued, “If they were locals, they knew about this clearing where a lot of campers and hikers pull off. Then, if you go another mile up this trail, you reach a paved road. So, one guy parked the camper here where you see it, then got into the getaway vehicle, and within a few minutes, they were making their getaway on the paved road up ahead.”

  Major Schaeffer had done a credible job of reconstructing the crime, partly because he’d already had some time on the scene with CSI people putting their heads together, and partly because he had knowledge of the area.

  I said to Major Schaeffer, “I assume you have the key to this camper, which was missing from Harry’s key chain in the morgue.”

  “I do.” He reminded me, “You said you didn’t handle the evidence in the morgue.”

  “Did I say that?” I continued, “I also assume you confirmed that the Chevy truck key you found on the chain was for this camper.”

  He looked at me. “We’re not as smart as you city guys, Detective, but we’re not stupid.”

  Based on my previous experiences with rural and suburban cops, I realized that statement was long overdue. I said, “Just checking,” then asked, “How do you think the perpetrators moved this camper three miles from where the body and the ignition key were found?”

  “They could have hot-wired the camper, towed it with their other vehicle, or even had a duplicate key made before the crime. But the most likely answer is that the victim had a spare key on his person, or in the vehicle.”

  “Right.” I told him about the apparently missing spare Chevy key in Harry’s wallet, and asked him, “Did you notice that?”

  He didn’t reply directly but informed me, “The absence of a key among other keys is not proof that there was a key.”

  “Right . . . I’m just speculating.”

  Actually, this was a detective’s pissing match, which we all do to keep everyone on their toes, which is good for the investigation, not to mention the detectives’ egos.

  Kate seemed to sense this and said, “In any case, this was made to appear that Harry left the camper here, and began walking north, toward the Custer Hill Club, and met with an accident three miles from his camper, and about three more miles from the Custer Hill property.” She concluded, “Bottom line, he would not have parked six miles from the surveillance property. Plus, the phone call to his girlfriend at seven forty-eight A.M. indicated he was near the subject property, but that’s not where he was found. Therefore, we have problems with time, distance, logic, and plausibility, which leads us to conclude that what we see here is not what Harry actually did on Saturday morning, but what someone did to him about a day later.”

  That pretty much summed it up, and neither Major Schaeffer nor I had anything to add.

  So we’d done all we could here, which wasn’t much, but you had to begin at the scene of the crime, then work backward and forward from there.

  The trick was not to become process oriented but to remember the goal, which was to find the killer. The good news was that I had a suspect. Bain Madox. And I had a possible accomplice. Carl. But neither of those names was going to appear on the New York state police homicide report.

  I asked Schaeffer, “Are the FBI agents in your office coming out here?”

  “I asked them, and they said another team would do that—an Evidence Recovery Team. These guys in my office don’t seem particularly interested in the crime scene.”

  No, I thought, they were more interested in Bain Madox than Harry Muller. And Liam Griffith was only interested in John Corey and Kate Mayfield.

  But for me, it was important that I see where Harry Muller had died, and to think about how he’d died: a helpless, drugged prisoner, a police officer, doing his duty, murdered by a person or persons who didn’t think as much of Harry Muller’s life as they thought of their own self-interests, whatever they were.

  I wondered if Bain Madox—assuming it was Madox—had tried to think of another solution to whatever problem Harry Muller posed for him. Surely there must have been a moment when murder was not the best solution, when some other, more clever course of action would have solved whatever problem Madox had with Harry Muller’s appearance at the Custer Hill Club.

  Most criminals—from the very stupid to the very clever—don’t understand the fo
rces they put into motion when they decide on murder to solve a problem. The ones who do understand often try to make it look like an accident, suicide, or natural death. And by doing that, they usually leave more clues than if they’d made it look like an everyday murder and robbery.

  The best way to cover up a murder is with the complete disappearance of the body, which, along with the crime scene, holds too many clues. But Bain Madox had a unique problem: he needed to get a soon-to-be-dead Federal agent off his property and onto someone else’s property—in this case, state land—where the body could be found before state and local police and Federal agents came around looking for the missing person on Madox’s property. Therefore, Madox had something on his property—other than Harry Muller—that he didn’t want anyone to see.

  This, what we saw here, was Madox’s solution, and it wasn’t a bad quick fix. It would not, however, survive a full-blown homicide investigation.

  If my other theory was correct, however, then time was all Madox wanted before he became a suspect. This bastard had already lit a fuse, and it was burning faster than it would take to find the bomb.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  We returned to Schaeffer’s car, turned around, and headed back down the trail. No one had much to say.

  We were approaching the T-intersection where the undercover state troopers were still hacking away at the brush. Schaeffer stopped and asked them, “Anything to report?”

  One of the guys replied, “The black Jeep did a recon ten minutes ago, and the driver asked us what we were doing.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him we were clearing brush and leaves, which are potential fuel sources for forest fires started by careless motorists throwing lit smoking materials out the window.”